The House We Build
by LivingForTv
Summary: EO Challenge. We got a photo of a derelict house and were asked to write a story inspired by it. Mine ran to 666 words and deals with the haunting of a house.


**Author's Note: **Written for the E/O Challenge. We got a wonderful photo of a derelict house to spin a story around, using between 100 and 1000 words.

**Disclaimer: **_Supernatural_ is not mine, but if it was I'd expand the budget so they didn't have to kill of all my favourite characters!

**Word Count: **666 (I just had to)

**Warning: **None.

**The House We Build**

I hold the belief that Earth was created to be Paradise, but humans insist on making it Hell. There are so many examples I could use I don't rightly know where to begin… but let me show you one. It begins with a run-down house with a disappointingly ordinary address – Birchwood street 112. The house had been a poor job to start with. Although it looked mighty pretty for some ten years after it was built, it soon became apparent that the materials had been cheap and the workmanship shoddy and it began to crumble. The family tried selling it, couldn't, and left anyway, leaving no forwarding address and an eyesore to the community. Things like this happen every day. Still, everything would have been alright if there hadn't been a Depression in the country at the time. No one got around to take care of the house.

The other houses that were planned to spring up around it weren't built, and the beautiful gardens the architects had dreamed of stayed desert. Thus, the air of resentment and crushed dreams wasn't dispersed by new life but clung to the flaking paint, sinking foundation and lopsided windows like an invisible fog that would, if one had been psychic, looked kind of grey. Every now and then a party of migrants would lurk there, hoping and failing to find work in the area. They moved on but shreds of their hopelessness, desperation and needs got tangled in the house's own misery and darkened the hue of the fog. Which people didn't see, of course. Unless they were psychic.

Times got better again and the Depression ended. Some houses in the neighbourhood were torn down, some repaired and new ones built, shops and schools opened and roads and buses connected the people to the City. The pulse quickened. But no one built close to Birchwood street 112. It was on the outskirts and frankly, the look of the house lowered the market value. No one got around to tearing it down either, since no one knew who owned it. Still, at this time the only reason no one went there was called common sense. Something might fall on you.

The town prospered as the citizens went around building their lives, porches and careers. They went to kindergarten plays, soccer games, fun fairs, weddings, jobs and schools. Happiness, unity and peace on earth, right? Well, being humans they also bullied, cheated, abused and killed their neighbours. And like a magnet the house attracted it all. Soon every teenager feeling out of joint queued up to hang out there. Until the build-up of misery got so tangible only the truly desperate would go there, encouraged by the fog to end it all. Kids started dying. Tainted souls that would otherwise, however reluctantly, have moved on, were drawn there. Each adding their own flavour of terror, dragging their own demons.

But black… is only a colour and not enough to describe what the psychics saw – a nightmare of darkness. As the body count rose it made hunters' to-do list, and the first to reach it was a pair of brothers. In a flurry of bullets, silver, holy symbols, violence and fire they banished and put to rest left and right until all the lost souls were gone. Then they left, certain that they'd saved the day. Fools. The black fog can't be killed, and it won't disappear because the souls leave. Healing is what's needed and it sure takes longer. That's where I come into the picture.

I, and others like me, go there each year to sing, pray and meditate Heaven's white light into this derelict house where humans will never live again. All to slow the descent of Earth into Hell. Healing is so tiresome and maiming comes so easy. Sometimes I reckon we should just stop, and let humanity live in the blackness it creates. But if I didn't struggle against it, well, I wouldn't be Missouri no longer.


End file.
